Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people • Hacker News Board

Re: Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people

#21

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 3:41 AM UTC

Retra wrote: post #16

CamperBob2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Shrug) Put it in Antarctica. It'll be fine for 10,000 years there. No one will stumble across it accidentally, and we can get it back if we need it. I've never understood why this is considered a problem.

What gives you the ability to make a prediction on the 10,000-year scale? That seems wildly inappropriate. 10,000 years ago, you'd be the person saying "We should bury our magic artifacts in a big tomb in the desert! Nobody will find out what is inside for 10,000 years, because nobody can live in the desert and the sand is too hard to travel across..." Any you'd be completely wrong about that. Because 10,000 years is…

The concern with long-term storage in places like WIPP is the possibility that future subliterate humans may access the site without being able to understand the warnings. But if we store the waste in Antarctica, that's not a realistic possibility. No one can go there without access to significant intellectual and technological resources.

And it's unreasonable to suggest that nuclear waste couldn't be safely stored on the moon. Any future civilizations who can travel to the moon will almost certainly be acquainted with nuclear physics themselves. However, launching high-level waste into space has obvious risks of its own. It will also make it hard to recycle it later, if future technologies are able to extract more power from it.

Re: Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people

#22

Post by Retra » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 5:01 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #21

Retra wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gives you the ability to make a prediction on the 10,000-year scale? That seems wildly inappropriate. 10,000 years ago, you'd be the person saying "We should bury our magic artifacts in a big tomb in the desert! Nobody will find out what is inside for 10,000 years, because nobody can live in the desert and the sand is too hard to travel across..." Any you'd be completely wrong about that. Because 10,000 years is…

The concern with long-term storage in places like WIPP is the possibility that future subliterate humans may access the site without being able to understand the warnings. But if we store the waste in Antarctica, that's not a realistic possibility. No one can go there without access to significant intellectual and technological resources. And it's unreasonable to suggest that nuclear waste couldn't be safely stored o…

It's just as likely for some very literate future humans to build a city on top of it and have it seep into their ground water. Or maybe even a volcano or earthquake knocks it all out into our oceans.

It's not about other people being too stupid to handle it. It's that we're too stupid to handle it right now, so any way we handle it is liable to be a huge mistake in both unforeseen and easy-to-predict ways.

Re: Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people

#23

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 5:18 AM UTC

Retra wrote: post #22

CamperBob2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concern with long-term storage in places like WIPP is the possibility that future subliterate humans may access the site without being able to understand the warnings. But if we store the waste in Antarctica, that's not a realistic possibility. No one can go there without access to significant intellectual and technological resources. And it's unreasonable to suggest that nuclear waste couldn't be safely stored o…

It's just as likely for some very literate future humans to build a city on top of it and have it seep into their ground water. Or maybe even a volcano or earthquake knocks it all out into our oceans. It's not about other people being too stupid to handle it. It's that we're too stupid to handle it right now, so any way we handle it is liable to be a huge mistake in both unforeseen and easy-to-predict ways.

I think you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. Nobody is going to build a city on top of anything in Antarctica. The other calamities you mention aren't going to happen either, at least not in any location chosen for this purpose.

Meanwhile, people are dying right now from fossil fuel emissions. It just doesn't look all edgy and apocalyptic on CNN the way a nuclear accident does, so you don't care.

Re: Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people

#24

Post by opo » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 7:06 AM UTC

hyperpallium wrote: post #17

kahrkunne wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind power kills more people per kWh than nuclear does. Hydro power often relies on dams that devastate ecosystems. Solar is expensive as hell. I don't even know about tidal, does anyone even do that?

> Wind energy kills a mere 100 people or so per trillion kWhrs, the majority from falls during maintenance activities https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-ea...

According to wikipedia, wind kills about 150 per trillion Kwh. This is significantly more than nuclear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents

Re: Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people

#25

Post by opo » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 7:18 AM UTC

labster wrote: post #6

CamperBob2 wrote: post #2

So the compounds released from burning coal and the compounds found inside natural fog – an aqueous medium made of, you guessed it, water – work together to make droplets of sulphuric acid, the same stuff that makes 'acid rain'. Remind me again why we can't have nuclear power?

Because nuclear leaves toxic waste that lasts over 10000 years in the best case; and because wind, hydro, solar, and tidal are better alternatives in most cases.

>Because nuclear leaves toxic waste that lasts over 10000 years in the best case;

That might be theoretically true for the moment, but not in the near future. Right now waste can and should be recycled which would reduce the amount of waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:

>...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

>...and because wind, hydro, solar, and tidal are better alternatives in most cases.

Most cases? How is that? The issue with most of those sources are the very low capacity factor. There are obvious reasons that (except for hydro) that currently they generate very little percentage of the world's electricity. In the case of hydro it has caused more environmental devastation than almost any power source except coal and the accidents have caused orders of magnitude more devastation than other power sources.

Re: Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people

#26

Post by tmnvix » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 10:03 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #9

labster wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because nuclear leaves toxic waste that lasts over 10000 years in the best case; and because wind, hydro, solar, and tidal are better alternatives in most cases.

(Shrug) Put it in Antarctica. It'll be fine for 10,000 years there. No one will stumble across it accidentally, and we can get it back if we need it. I've never understood why this is considered a problem.

Transporting it there might be an issue.

Re: Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people

#27

Post by astrodust » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 11:34 AM UTC

Retra wrote: post #16

CamperBob2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Shrug) Put it in Antarctica. It'll be fine for 10,000 years there. No one will stumble across it accidentally, and we can get it back if we need it. I've never understood why this is considered a problem.

What gives you the ability to make a prediction on the 10,000-year scale? That seems wildly inappropriate. 10,000 years ago, you'd be the person saying "We should bury our magic artifacts in a big tomb in the desert! Nobody will find out what is inside for 10,000 years, because nobody can live in the desert and the sand is too hard to travel across..." Any you'd be completely wrong about that. Because 10,000 years is…

Transport is the only problem here. If there's a way of reburning fuel, or of containing it on-site long enough that most of the most harmful radiation has subsided you'll be fine.

The shorter the half-life, the more dangerous the radiation is. Radioactive elements with long half lives are generally less damaging and it's only from prolonged exposure you're in trouble.

Polonium is notoriously toxic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...) and has a furiously short half-life. Plutonium has a half-life of about 24,000 years so the radiation is spread out over a much, much longer period of time.

You can hold a plutonium sphere and suffer no ill-effects. The same cannot be said for one of polonium, something so nasty that nanograms of the material can kill you.

So basically it's the short-lived elements you need to worry about the most. The long-lived ones are relatively harmless. The biggest concern with those is securing them from those intent on using them for harm, as refining and weaponizing nuclear waste is a concern.

Re: Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people

#28

Post by db48x » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 1:49 PM UTC

JadeNB wrote: post #18

db48x wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put the waste there without putting the power plants there.

But now you have the problem of transporting large quantities of nuclear waste for long time periods, with little tolerance for delays or stoppages.

No, the existing storage pools at nuclear reactors provide a long-term buffer that can smooth out any irregularities in shipping. After all, there already is such an irregularity.

Once you start shipping the waste again, it's not really all that difficult. It's transported in containers which are essentially indestructible.

Re: Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people

#29

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 5:43 PM UTC

tmnvix wrote: post #26

CamperBob2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Shrug) Put it in Antarctica. It'll be fine for 10,000 years there. No one will stumble across it accidentally, and we can get it back if we need it. I've never understood why this is considered a problem.

Transporting it there might be an issue.

So, make the Navy earn their keep by escorting it.

The US and Russian navies have already been transporting nuclear material all over the planet on their ships and submarines, in the form of both power-generation reactors and ballistic missiles. They have been doing so for decades with a very good safety record.

Re: Scientists have figured out the reason London fog killed 12,000 people

#30

Post by MrZongle2 » Mon, Nov 21, 2016, 5:47 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #2

So the compounds released from burning coal and the compounds found inside natural fog – an aqueous medium made of, you guessed it, water – work together to make droplets of sulphuric acid, the same stuff that makes 'acid rain'. Remind me again why we can't have nuclear power?

"Remind me again why we can't have nuclear power?"

Ignorance and fear.

The Three Mile Island accident (1979) took place less than two weeks after the release of the movie The China Syndrome, the plot of which featured a coverup of a major nuclear accident. Activists seized the opportunity, and then-President Jimmy Carter (who had personal experience with nuclear engineering) failed to properly rein in public fears or beliefs about the accident (https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=sM1RAAAAIBAJ&sjid=W20D...). Despite a tenuous-at-best link between the accident and human health (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Hea...), for the longest time it was considered a "disaster". Growth of the nuclear industry in the United States took a major hit at this point.

Subsequent films such as Silkwood and general Cold War nuclear war fears did little to change the opinion of the layman that nuclear == bad.

The 1986 Chernobyl accident further reinforced these beliefs. People focused on the aftermath of the explosion and the Soviet coverup and generally ignored the underlying causes such as the antiquated design of the reactor and operator error. This incident had a major negative effect on the nuclear industry.

The 2011 Fukushima accident was an trainwreck of corporate negligence and insufficient government oversight. The facility, which had been operating since 1971, performed as intended when the earthquake struck but the subsequent tsunami breached the insufficient (identified as such since 2008) seawall and took out the generators powering the shutdown.

All these incidents demonstrate cases where negligence or antiquated design can lead to disaster. But few take a look at the successes. France, for instance, is a major user of nuclear energy and has avoided catastrophe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Accide...).

Fear of nuclear power is akin to "reefer madness" nonsense in the 1940s and 1950s.